Tortures

Music as a torture weapon: exploring the dark side

We usually talk about the way music moves us – to joy, passion, excitement, melancholy, fury even – but music can also be put to much darker uses, something that is rarely discussed. Over the course of Radio 3’s Why Music?weekend, Morag Grant and Suzanne Cusick threw light on the disturbing history of music’s use in, and as, torture.

The impetus for much of their research over the past few years was the revelation of the ways music was one of the tools used to degrade and destabilise prisoners in the war on terror in locations including Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.